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Talk:Planetary Mechanics/@comment-5381085-20150410182524
My thoughts: '''1. '''Installation costs and profit values are perfect. After running the numbers of several possible ventures they all seem to offer excellent options requiring varying patience and investment but all paying off accordingly. One thing that could be a possible concern is how much of the resources there actually are in the ground. Realistically there should be tens or even hundreds of thousands of units of Fuel on a world like Varda; a planet that's had bountiful plant life dying on it for ages and ages (consider that we've been mining hundreds of billions of barrels of oil from Earth for hundreds of years irl). Obviously however each deposit will have a considerably smaller number of units. Thus the challenge is obviously investing in prospecting to find other deposits. For example, on Varda we're currently mining a gas deposit we found on the planet when first settled. Let's say this is 'Gas Site 1' and has ~2000 units of natural gas. However when this runs out, we prospect and find 'Gas Site 2' halfway across the planet with another few thousand units available within. Might I suggest we could then move the now-obsolete Mining Complex (or complexes) at Gas Site 1 to Gas Site 2; for some percentage of it's original build-cost? '''2. '''Population Growth, this is somewhat tricky issue. Earth's current population growth is ~1% per annum, so I would say we use a base of 1% growth per annum, and all the listed population modifiers be reduced by a factor of 10 (ie -0.1% for radium mine). Considering this drastic reduction if the effectiveness of agri-complexes on population growth, I believe they should offer their population growth modifiers (ie +0.1% for tier 1; +0.2% for tier 2; and +0.3% for tier 3 after the factor-of-10 reduction mentioned earlier) IN ADDITION to their current profit figures, rather than instead-of. On a final aside to this subject, I don't think we should earn any money from taxes, since a government is not a for-profit institution. Rather the taxes of the citizens are paying for things like police, PDF, and infrastructure we do not have to pay for or worry about. '''3. '''Finally, eco-damage and resilience. Both in-canon and irl, industrial pollution only starts having any sort of noticable effect on climate once you start reaching populations of at least several billion, and even then the changes take centuries of high-level, non-stop industry to manifest. Varda has ~3 million people, the environmental consequences of whatever industry they are capable of running is utterly null. I'll come back to this shortly. Now, every single stage of industry needs one thing, people. As such I would say we have a cap of 1 unit per 100k people. So if we have ~3m people, that's 30 units of industry allowed, so if we had a tier 2 Gas Mine harvesting 3 units of fuel, a tier 2 Ferrum Mine harvesting 3 units of Ferrum, and a Forge/Refinery turning both into 3 units of Ammunition, that is 9 units of total industry. 9 out of an available 30. This provides incentive to raise population and also places a logical cap on the number of resource installations you can have. So back to environmental effect. If each unit of industry correlates to about 100k people, then environmental effects should only start propogating once you reach at least 1000 units (100 million people), and even then would be extremely slow. Given the stats outlined on this page, we can say that you're causing 1 unit of eco-damage for every 5-10 units of industry. So this means that environmental effects only start propogating when you hit 100-200 eco-damage. This means a minimum resilience of ~100 eco-damage. Let's carry on with this comparison of 1 unit of eco-damage per 500k-1m people. On Earth, with an average population of ~2 billion over the last few hundred years (correlating to 1000-2000 eco-damage per year), and we've only suffered consequences that could be called 'concerning' at worst. Disregarding the resilience of about 100 that means the planet is losing 1k-2k eco-points every year for several hundred years, and is still nowhere near the kind of desolate wasteland a hiveworld is described as (what I'd call a world with 0 eco-points left). This suggests the typical planet is going to have an eco-point store in the range of several million. The general point I'm getting at is that Varda is going to have to get a LOT more populous before we have to worry about the effects of industry on it's environment.